Monday, December 7, 2015

Right Wing World: Presidential Politics Off The Rails

If this were my first or second year of blogging, I'd probably be typing my fingers into stumps, trying to keep up with the utter insanity overtaking Republican politics right now. But it isn't. I'm actually in my ninth year, and no longer feel compelled to hit this stuff quite so hard. I'm actually kind of glad I don't. It's making me crazy enough as it is.

Listen, I am aware that a lot of what's going on in the world is scary, confusing, complicated and difficult to process. It's just as hard as a hobbyist blogger (i.e., no more professional training than your average talk radio boob or FOX "News"-babe) to figure out what to write. The president spoke from the Oval Office last night, ordinarily something I'd write about. But I listened to the conservative response, which was uniformly negative, naturally, and just threw up my hands. Because, surely the president knows nothing and we really should be following what Joe Scarborough or Sean Hannity thinks we should do, right?

Image from source, Washington Post

Trouble is, the people auditioning for the actual president's job are quite arguably worse than the idiots in the conservative media. Any pretense at looking "presidential" is out the window. Any caution for how their words are perceived internationally is ignored. Even reality itself seems rather malleable in Right Wing World. You've got Trump ready to ignore Muslim Americans' civil rights, you've got Ted Cruz talking about nuking and "carpet bombing" (a war crime) swaths of the Middle East. Conservative standard-bearers--allegedly strict constitutional constructionists--want to throw out religious freedom (unless it's made-up Christian "persecution"). Everything has gone topsy-turvy. And it just keeps getting worse.

I get really bummed when I read internet polls or comments sections, and see these "conservatives" on board with this shit! This is allegedly the cautious party, the party afraid of change, the ones about "rule of law" and "personal responsibility" saying and doing whatever it is that their frothing-at-the-mouth, batshit crazy base will eat with a spoon. Regardless of whether or not it's the most anti-American, potentially unconstitutional, often internationally illegal and quite literally illogical claptrap ever spewed in politics.

Maybe I need to come back to this thing more often.

[Excerpt]Donald Trump is a disaster for Republicans. And they can’t do a thing about it.

Donald Trump seemed to signal a new -- and even darker -- phase of his front-running campaign for the Republican presidential nomination Monday when he released a statement insisting that Muslims should be banned from entering the country under any circumstances "until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on. . ."